Jesus Diaz

Screw the Grammys. The only thing I want to see tonight is this tiny short by Wayne Unten showing the imagined takeoff of Olivia Wright in 1903, "the first to pilot the great grasshoppers of North America."

While taking my kids to the playground, I shot live-action footage of a grasshopper, using my iPhone.

This is one of many short animated clips I've made for fun. I might continue this particular clip as an Insect Aviation series... who knows :)It was my first project using TV Paint animation software. (No rotoscoping used. Where's the fun in that?!)

Exactly. Where's the fun in that? And where's that fun elsewhere, in fact? Most animation and live studio movies are commercial shit nowadays. When they are not studio-controlled focus-groups driven films created as platforms to sell merchandise, they're unimaginative rehashes of the same old stuff.

Which is why something like this is better—six seconds that capture my imagination in a thousand different directions. Where's Olivia headed? Why? What's she going to find? What dangers would she have to survive? Or maybe I like it so much because I have always wondered what would it fell like to fly on top of an insect or a bird or a giant dragon.